New error found in county election results

Once again, the Humboldt County Election Transparency Project has found an error in the county's final tallies from the November election.

Humboldt County Registrar of Voters Carolyn Crnich announced that the first-of-its kind transparency project uncovered the fact that 57 vote-by-mail ballots from a Petrolia precinct were counted twice in the results certified by the Board of Supervisors early last month. This revelation comes about a month after the transparency project discovered that almost 200 ballots from a Eureka precinct disappeared from the final results due to a programming error in Premier Elections Solutions software used to add up the county's votes.

The double-counted ballots, Crnich said, would not have changed the outcome of any of the election's races.

According to Crnich, it remains unclear whether the 57 double-counted ballots were the result of the same software error uncovered last month, a completely different problem, or simply the result of operator error.

Crnich also announced that an error had been discovered in the transparency project itself. She said 63 duplicate images were placed online, which she attributed to operator error and a simple "hiccup" in getting a first-of-its-kind program up and running.

The Humboldt County Election Transparency Project takes every ballot cast in an election and passes them through an optical scan machine after they are officially counted. The ballot images are then placed online and available for anyone to download.

Open-source software, created by volunteer Mitch Trachtenberg, allows viewers to sort and count ballots to conduct recounts at their pleasure.

Back in the beginning of December, the project unearthed a software error in the version of Premier Elections Solutions' -- formerly known as Diebold Election Systems -- software used in Humboldt and two other California counties. The error sometimes results in the first deck of ballots scanned through the vote counting machine, sometimes known as the "zero deck," to vanish without a trace from the final election results when another deck is deliberately deleted by elections staff.

According to a spokesman, Premier Elections Solutions had known about the error since 2004, and had issued "work-around" instructions via e-mail to its customers instructing them how to avoid the problem.

Crnich said Friday that there is some reason to believe the recent problem is related to what is now know in some circles as the "zero deck bug."

According to Crnich, the 57 duplicate ballots were run through the same scanner on the same day as the 197 disappeared ballots. In this case, Crnich said it's possible that an election worker tried to delete the deck of 57 ballots in order to re-scan them, feeling an error had occurred, but the software bug instead left those ballots in the system and deleted the zero deck.

But, it seems equally likely that the duplicate ballots were the result of operator error -- that an election worker intended to delete one of the batches and forgot or inadvertently scanned the ballots twice.

"I'd guess operator error is the most likely (explanation)," Trachtenberg said, "but, given what's happened with Diebold in the past, I'd never rule (the possibility of a software error) out."

Crnich said she has passed all information about the new vote discrepancy on to California Secretary of State Debra Bowen's office for review.

Kate Folmar, a spokeswoman for Bowen's office, said earlier this week that her office's "fact-finding" mission into the "deck-zero bug" is ongoing.

Federal Elections Assistance Commission Chairwoman Rosemary Rodriguez said in a previous interview with the Times-Standard that the commission has asked for reports on the error from both Crnich and Bowen, and will widely disseminate them when they become available.

Regardless of the cause of the new error, it now seems obvious that both it and the previous one would have slipped through unnoticed if not for the transparency project.

North Coast Congressman Mike Thompson, who penned a letter to the federal Elections Assistance Commission making it aware of Humboldt's voting issues, issued a statement last month voicing support for the project.

"Our community should be extremely proud of the effort by local citizens and the county registrar, Carolyn Crnich, who put together this ground-breaking pilot project," Thompson said. "The Humboldt County Election Transparency Project made sure that, in this county, every vote really does count."